Developers have never had more tools at their disposal, but has this explosion of tools also made web development difficult? Have we erected new barriers to entry for anyone looking to break into a career in web development?

In this free online meetup, Jory Burson will explore the question of when and how web development became so complicated by looking at the evolution of the industry. Then Raymond Camden will explore some of the tools out there designed to help developers learn new skills and highlight some of the pros and cons of each.

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Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?

Learning web development from scratch can be a daunting task. In addition to programming languages, there are all kinds of tools it seems you need to master just to get started: bundlers, taskrunners, package managers, transpilers… when and how did web development get to be so complicated? In this talk, we’ll follow the evolution of a web page through time, introducing it to technical obstacles and innovations until we arrive at present day. We’ll come away with a better appreciation for the problems our modern tools solve, and historical context for how the field has evolved.

Jory Burson

Jory is a consultant and educator working to improve collaboration in open source and open standards communities as a member of several industry boards and standards setting organizations. She is sponsored by Bocoup to advocate for web developers on Ecma International’s Executive Committee, the JS Foundation Technical Architecture Committee, the W3C Advisory Council, the MDN Product Advisory Board, and works on projects with Ecma TC39, Ecma TC53, and Web Platform Tests.

Learning the Web Your Own Way

There’s an incredible amount of things a web developer needs to know with new things being released every day. How does a new developer even begin to learn? How do they keep up? In this talk, Raymond
will discuss various different options, pros and cons of each, and introduce you to some options you may not have heard of.

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden is a developer advocate starting a new job soon. Until then, his bio is boring. Please google “pictures of cats” instead. Raymond can be reached at his blog, @raymondcamden on Twitter.